Carlyle came away from a series of one-on-one meetings with players the past week with his own midseason assessment of where the team stands. Among the harsh realities are a November knee injury that knocked defenseman Francois Beauchemin out for the season, current injuries sidelining right wing Teemu Selanne and defenseman Kent Huskins, and a second-half schedule that is heavy on road games.

The Ducks have also been hurt by a maddening tendency to blow leads, particularly of late, and their continued propensity to take penalties. The Ducks have been short-handed 216 times, compared to their own power-play total of only 155, which accounts for by far the largest discrepancy in the league.

“We’ve found ways to give points away, and that cannot continue,” Carlyle said. “You have to be smart, and we have not been smart enough. That’s a criticism that’s pretty easy to make when you take the number of penalties that we take.”

Still stung by his team’s 7-1 defeat at the Wachovia Center last month, Washington Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau recently took some verbal shots at the Flyers for what he perceived as running up the score.

“What goes around comes around eventually,” he told NHL.com. “And it will.”

“You guys can take this Boudreau stuff and you can take it somewhere else,” Stevens told reporters. “I’m not getting drawn in tit-for-tat stuff. I don’t know where this is going. Bruce coaches the Washington Capitals. I don’t care what he says. I’ve got my team to get ready here. This is obviously an important game, a hard game, and I don’t care what he said, to be honest with you. He can say what he wants….”

There is some serious concern and all kinds of tough questions coming out of Pittsburgh.

This Penguin team is a shell of the one we watched in June, and despite the legitimate excuse of some key injuries to Ryan Whitney and Sergei Gonchar and the departure of Marian Hossa, Ryan Malone and Gary Roberts, they have underachieved in a big way.

Pittsburgh still boasts two of the three top scorers in the NHL, but even Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby have not been themselves. Malkin, the NHL leading scorer has zero goals in his last right games and has only two points in six. Crosby has done more damage with his fists than his stick lately with just two goals in his last 17 games played, and has been held pointless in eight of those 17.

If the players have tuned out their head coach Michel Therrien and are trying to get him fired, they are doing a good job.

...OK, puckheads, now that we’ve wasted a few seconds of your time, we draw your attention to tonight’s game between Backstrom’s Capitals and the visiting Philadelphia Flyers.

The last time these two teams met was Dec. 20, when the Flyers pasted the Caps, 7-1. That was their first encounter since last spring’s first-round, seven-game playoff victory by Philadelphia. Needless to say, the Caps were looking forward to tonight.

“We had like 50 shots on them that night [48 to be exact],” Backstrom said of the Dec. 20 game. “It was a weird game. Everybody on the team is very much excited about this game [tonight].”

We like Washington’s chances. The Caps are an Eastern Conference-best 17-1-1 at home.